The background description provided herein is for the purpose of generally presenting the context of the disclosure. Work of the presently named inventors, to the extent it is described in this background section, as well as aspects of the description that may not otherwise qualify as prior art at the time of filing, are neither expressly nor impliedly admitted as prior art against the present disclosure.
Ever-increasing user expectations for high performance and increased feature sets have led to the inclusion of multi-core processors in most computing devices. These multi-core processors often enable mobile or low-power computing devices to perform tasks once reserved for full-power desktop computers or servers. Mobile or low-power computing devices, however, are often limited in an amount of power they may consume (e.g. battery life or thermal considerations). An amount of power consumed to perform these tasks may vary as the tasks range from low complexity (e.g., audio playback) to high complexity (e.g., video editing or streaming). Low complexity tasks can often be executed by a simple processor core (e.g. a core with a limited instruction set) that consumes a small amount of power while high complexity tasks are often executed using one or more complex processor cores (e.g. cores with full instruction sets) that consume large amounts of power.